page_title: Cruft
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Cruft / History
caption_attribution_description: photo of Harvard Cruft Hall (Cruft Laboratory)
context_page_description: Cruft is a jargon word for anything that is left over, redundant and getting in the way. It is used particularly for defective, superseded, useless, superfluous, or dysfunctional elements in computer software.
context_section_description: Around 1958, the term was used in the sense of "garbage" by students frequenting the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In the 1959 edition of the club's dictionary, it was defined as "that which magically amounds in the Clubroom just before you walk in to clean up. In other words, rubbage". Its author Peter Samson later explained that this was meant in the sense of "detritus, that which needs to be swept up and thrown out. The dictionary has no definition for 'crufty,' a word I didn't hear until some years later". Cruft can also refer to alumni who remain socially active at MIT.
  The origin of the term is uncertain, but it may be derived from Harvard University's Cruft Laboratory (built in 1915 as a gift from a donor named Harriet Otis Cruft), which was the Harvard Physics Department's radar lab during World War II. As late as the early 1990s, unused technical equipment could be seen stacked in front of Cruft Hall's windows. According to students, if a place filled with useless machinery is called Cruft Hall, the machinery itself must be cruft. This image of "discarded technical clutter" would then have quickly migrated from hardware to software. Cruft may also be a play on the archaic medial "s", rendering "crust" as "cruſt". In the TMRC dictionary, the relation to the term "crud" (dirt, crap) is pointed out by humorously defining the better known word (crud) by the more obscure one (cruft).
  The Oxford English Dictionary offers an etymology of the word "crufty" and cites usage in Jamaica, where the word meant rough, coarse-looking or scabby, perhaps acting as a modified version of "scruffy".
caption: Harvard Cruft Laboratory
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